Interview with Kirsten Shepherd, Professor or English
Kirsten Shepherd is a Professor of English and Theatre Studies, and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Catherine’s College
What are you working on at the moment?
This is going to be a long one Helen! How much time do you have? Because I have so many irons in the fire... The Laura Kieler project is probably the easiest to start with. [Laura Kieler was a Norwegian-Danish playwright and novelist; a friend of Henrik Ibsen’s, her real life furnished the plot (without her permission) of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.] We’re reading through the translations that we're doing for the Oxford World's Classics edition (https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/a-dolls-house-men-of-honour-when-we-dead-awaken-9780198955092?cc=my&lang=da) that we're publishing of two Ibsen plays, with Laura Kieler's play Men of Honour sandwiched in between them. The volume highlights how they interacted through their plays, and this is the first time Laura Kieler’s play is available in English, so it's a kind of fresh look at Ibsen, but also introducing a new writer, a woman writer. The book is part of my collaboration with Breach Theatre, which is developing a play based on our research (that’s Tzen Sam’s and my research, and Tzen has been a key part of the project)—the play is going to be called Burning Down the House (https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/burning-down-the-house). The idea is they come out at the same time, so people who see the Breach play, which will introduce the English speaking world to Laura Kieler, and will contain a scene from Laura Kieler's play, people will want to go to the bookshop and get the play, and we want to make sure they can get it.
And then I'm also doing actually two articles about a play called Medicine Show. This is in my theatre and science stream of research. Medicine Show was so interesting to me because you can't get it anywhere, it's not published. You go to the Library of Congress to read this play. It was a Broadway play that advocated for socialised medicine in America, which doesn't exist. It advocated for essentially what got introduced in Britain, the NHS. This theatrical interaction with politics was being done on Broadway at the time, the same time as Roosevelt's bill for a national health service was going through Congress and was defeated by the American Medical Association, the doctors’ lobbying group—very powerful. Medicine Show is very interesting theatrically for what it does with the way it stages a hospital, for example, and the way it engages with political issues. But the thing that really interests me is that it began life as a script by the Federal Theatre Project, which was this brief, shining moment when America had a National Theatre. It was during the Depression, and was part of Roosevelt's Works Public Administration package, and it put all these unemployed theatre people to work, and it was just the most incredible moment. It got shut down by the same committee that Joseph McCarthy ended up running, the same committee associated with the so-calledRed Scare, hauling artists and writers suspected of being Communists before hearings and so on. America’s ‘witch hunt.’ That's an interaction that interests me a lot, science, theatre and politics.
And then I have another chapter I'm doing on the phenomenon of psychogenic blindness, which I’m co-authoring with Dr Daniel Abdalla. There are lots of plays in the late nineteenth, turn of twentieth century, all these plays in which a character literally goes blind on stage because of a kind of emotional trigger. It’s as if they have a sort of ticking bomb inside them and if they are exposed to any kind of emotional trauma they’ll go blind. So the audience is just waiting for that to happen. And it's brilliant drama, and it's really interesting. Our chapter explores four plays that have this element of psychogenic blindness to them. And who would have thought, right?! I find I have this propensity to ferret out the most obscure kind of things... Mostly they’re not even published, but I just love to do that! So I'm doing this with my former doctoral student, Daniel Abdalla, who is now a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. And he also is involved in my project, LitHits that I do (https://lithits.web.ox.ac.uk/).
LitHits is a weekly newsletter at the minute, but the idea is that we want to kind of put digital reading out there in a whole different way and on a bigger scale. The concept is very simple: we use a short form text, like a poem, a passage from a novel, unabridged, and they're all in the public domain. And you see a little curation around it, but it’s not heavy “here's what this poem means”, but more like, “here's what we love about this poem”. The unique selling point is what we can do that Amazon for example can't do. They can tell you, “Oh, you liked this? Well, you'll like that.” But those algorithms can't do what human curation can do, which is to create a unique reader pathway based on our combined literary expertise. So for example, we can say, “Here's this poem from 1784, and there's this other work of literature from 1893 that actually connects really interestingly with it.” We can draw attention to unexpected links between texts, and illuminate unfamiliar terms, motifs, and so on. We also use really striking images with the texts (also all public domain—everything’s free!). So kind of finding connections across different time periods and different genres that you wouldn't find if you didn't have that literary insight, just from working with literature for so many years cumulatively across our little team of curators which includes Dr Alexandra Paddock, Dr Abdalla, various guest curators, and me It's not saying we're anti-algorithms etc; we're saying we can harness the digital landscape better, and not just that people keep finding things they like, but actually something more stimulating and unexpected and hopefully interesting to them.
And then finally, I'm doing a life writing project I wanted to mention. It’s a project called Pulling Up Stakes, and it’s about my great grandmother and her immigration from Kent to Canada. So it's looking at everydayness and women's lives and women and work. It's fascinating how that all comes together in this one person, whom we’re using as a kind of window onto a bunch of different contexts. We have a website (https://www.cabinet.ox.ac.uk/pulling-stakes-0) – I worked with Dr Lauren Cullen, who is also a former doctoral student, and she really just single handedly built a fantastic website. It's very much about images and objects as well as text, the kind of thing that leads the project. A book is so finite; it's like this thing is done and it's an inflexible output, whereas with the Fanny Shepherd project Pulling Up Stakes, you can go in and it's non-hierarchical, it's non-linear, you can dive into her life at one of five or six different entry points: immigration, women's work, publishing… So the thing about her, the reason I'm interested mainly is that she wrote short stories and published them. But she also had seven children, and she was working full time day-round on the farm and managing the local shop, petrol station, and post office. And yet she found time to write. So it's that kind of thing that interests me. But you can see how a platform like that allows you to encounter a life in a completely different way, rather than in that sort of “first this happened then that happened then that happened” way of a biography in a book.
So I'm doing a lot with digital forms because… You know, I'm really wary about AI, I think a lot of us are really worried. But I'm not anti-technology. I'm really interested in the digital landscape. What digital humanities looks like. But at the same time watching closely the impact of AI for the humanities. So that's a concern – I'd love to see how that comes up in the Performance Hub actually, because we're never going to get away from AI. It would be great if it could actually help Humanities work.
Perhaps relatedly: where you see performance research or performance and research coming together across disciplines in Oxford?
I was KE champion just as KE was becoming embedded, so 2015 to 2018…
Could you give a quick one-sentence definition of KE (Knowledge Exchange)?
Mutually beneficial interactions between an academic and a non-academic partner.
Thank you!
KE was a relatively new thing [then], where you could get money to explore something that didn't have to be an output, an impact.... Because I work on theatre and history and performance conditions and so on, I guess I just naturally started to say to people, “Think about ways in which you could work with a theatre company to convey that research, or just think differently about it, or just have some kind of encounter between your research and theatre.” And that made me think theatre's a great fit with all kinds of research, it doesn't have to be just within Humanities. So it just feels like a natural thing to put research and performance together, because it's outward-facing – we're always being told to be outward-facing! And you can stage ideas or components from your research without having to kind of be didactic like in a lecture. I think the key thing I like about it as well is that it's not some simple vessel, it's also that the knowledge that you have from your research gets productively interrogated by being put through a performance process. And then the final thing is that you encounter an audience and you are prompted to think about how those people are responding to your work.
What's your dream for the future of performance research in Oxford?
Wow, really? Oh, Helen, I have never been asked this. Have you ever been asked this?
I don't think that it would be going too far to say money. Investment in the people doing the research, that can lead to interesting performance initiatives. Like the KE Fellowships, but perhaps something specific to theatre, because we have these new spaces in the Schwarzman. We need donors to recognise how vital theatre and performance are for in the research community. And I think we need to try to get to a place like the sciences are in. I was thinking about the Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda, who had this groundbreaking set of lighting techniques, a really visionary designer. In the Czech landscape in the 1950s, support for theatre was really significant and they really took it seriously. Theatre wasn't just a marginal activity and Svoboda actually had a lab, a laboratory, and if we could almost harness the science model and say, “Let's have theatre laboratories, where we actually have teams of people with equipment...” He had all this great advanced equipment, so there was money there to do scenography, and it had a status, it had a recognition as an important thing to do. And so that's my dream, to have more of a sense that yeah, these things are worth investing in, you know, look at the innovation that can come out of supporting theatre work.
Finally, would you tell us about a performance that's special to you?
Wow. How do I pick? I mean, I do remember as a child being taken to see one of my first Shakespeare productions, and it was in New York. It was James Earl Jones playing Othello, and Christopher Plummer playing Iago. And it was unbelievable because there was this moment when Christopher Plummer as Iago stabs Cassio, but he did it in such a way that as he walked past him, he flicked the knife in just this extraordinarily agile movement. As a novice theatre-goer it was amazing to me to see the understatement, I guess. Well, I didn't have those words in my mind at the time, but you know that's stuck with me, that you didn't have to have a big, dramatic murder. And it seemed consistent with his character, you know? So that really stayed with me. That was Broadway. Who knows when, it was a long time ago, obviously, but, you know, the performances that stay with you for that reason, because they there's something that goes on that you just can't forget. I would love to know your special performance memory.
Oh, no, no one's turned this around on me!
You've had so long to think about it too!
I was listening to yours, I was really captivated!
It's really interesting because, like you, I find myself going, “What was really early and formative for me?” Which I think is really interesting, like how were we made as performance scholars in our youth. But in some ways, I almost want to push back on that, because I don't think having access to theatre when you're young should be the thing that determines your future, because that's structured by so many things.
I've thought about this a lot. I was so fortunate to be taken to a Broadway production featuring James Earl Jones, Christopher Plummer… There is a problem with it as you say. It's about access. It shouldn't be that you get into theatre because you're lucky enough to go to a Broadway show, you know.
And that also feels part of the vision of the future of performance in terms of wanting more money: we want more theatre that is affordable!
Exactly. We need money so we can do things that are for a public that doesn't have to pay a ton of money to see them. I think that's really what it's about. So enabling research, but that can then be engaged with. It’s a vision for the Schwarzman building, this openness, an architectural openness that can encourage site specific performance, all kinds of different informal performances in that public space. So it isn't just, “Here, pay £35 and you can come and see something in a black box.” You know, I don't want to repeat that sort of model.
The other big thing I would say about theatre, if we could be sustainable, I think that is a dream as well. We have at Catz [St Catherine’s College] this beautiful outdoor amphitheatre, and nobody ever uses it. It's stunning. It would be perfect for all the outdoor theatre in the summer. But the thing is that we have to think about the fact that theatre is a consumption model. We go and we use energy and we waste lots of energy getting there. We then buy stuff and eat it and you know, it's waste generating. It's costly to have a building and all that stuff. We know this, but how can we get more sustainable as of as an art form?
So that's another dream as well, but I feel like Oxford could be leading in that sense. Because, we have Environmental Humanities, we have Performance Research Hub, maybe they could speak to each other more.
What did you come up with of your own [special performance]?
I feel like I should have prepared something!
I will tell you while you're thinking about the most recent thing I saw – Gisèle Vienne, Extra Life (https://www.g-v.fr/en/shows/extra-life/) at Theatre de la Cite in Toulouse in France
The lighting, it just changed my whole understanding of what you can do with lighting on stage. And I've just been writing about women and lighting design, about Jean Rosenthal and Shirley Prendergast. Jean Rosenthal wrote a wonderful book called The Magic of Light, that's almost like a handbook on how to do really innovative, extraordinary lighting. So she was a real pioneer. And then Shirley Prendergast was this pioneering Black woman lighting designer. I was bringing those two women together as lighting innovators in different ways in a book chapter – the book is called Women and Scenography. Seeing that Gisèle Vienne production was such a revelation, having just been thinking a lot about women in lighting.
That’s amazing. Thank you.
Okay, in terms of an aspect of theatre that's really stuck with me: Nicholas Hytner's production of Midsummer Night's Dream at the Bridge in London a few years ago. It was brilliant. It swapped Titania and Oberon, so Titania – who's played by Gwendoline Christie, is the one who tricks Oberon into falling in love with Bottom with the donkey ears. And it's lively and queer and wonderful.
The thing about the Bridge is that it’s a theatre that has a pit where a lot of audience stand and the actors all move among them, sometimes at floor level, and the stage is deconstructed and reassembled around in this space, so you're constantly in the action. There's a brilliant bit where Oberon and Bottom are on this massive bed that is wheeled by ushers and you as the audience in the pit are encouraged to follow behind it, dancing in a kind of carnival. And in the second-half, as I knew we were approaching the bit where they return to deeply authoritarian Athens, I leant across to my friend and said, “I don't want to go back to Athens.” But then when we were back in Athens, with authoritarian Theseus, there was suddenly a clunk and a swoosh from above, and it was the bed that we'd all followed behind, which had been raised up into the flies, just moving horizontally across the stage. Theseus and Hippolyta (played by the same actors playing Oberon and Titania) look at one another and it was like something clicked for them and us, and you realised that this is a game, that they're still Oberon and Titania, and this is some weird game they play as a couple. And then from that moment on, suddenly Athens was vibrant and emotional and wonderful, and the mechanicals come on and do the show. And it was the absolute genius directorial decision to decide that every bit of script that Theseus says about the mechanicals’ play is dead serious. So when he says, “Moonshine is left to bury the dead”, he's holding back tears. For everyone else, this is the worst amateur dramatics they’ve ever seen, but Theseus is intensely moved by it.
It was something about how they just managed, without any words at all, to completely change the direction of the play. It was so clever. And I was so caught up in it. And I also remember being in the audience, everyone joining hands for a big dance at the end… It was really lovely.
You just wish Shakespeare could have seen it.
I think Shakespeare would love it. I mean, I think Shakespeare would just love that his plays are still making money, to be perfectly honest. But as someone who does like Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream is not my favourite play, but I think that might be my favourite production of a Shakespeare play.
You have to keep that part of our conversation in there!
Okay...
